I had to admit, watching Crystal in action was… enlightening. Absolute nightmare or not, celebrity bitch or not, she was surprisingly effective at fighting the snapdolphins, sending out beams of coherent light at long range with pinpoint accuracy to slice the half-dolphin half-lobster twenty-foot long monstrosities into pieces as they tried to clamber up the sea wall.

Usually, snapdolphins were relatively passive, schooling in giant herds in the deeps. Like all post-q-bomb hybrids, they would attack sentients in a frenzy if they thought they could get to them, but they tended to operate in packs and were smart enough not to get close enough to dangerous concentrations of humans and alphas to trigger their feeding frenzy.

Unless something was driving them, and it wasn’t until twenty minutes into the fight that we found out what exactly was causing their wave.

The Sea Wall was holding relatively well. As powerful as a snapdolphin might be, and at twenty feet of muscular scale-coated snapping claws and oversize toothy maw they were powerful indeed, even the hundreds that were swarming and trying with some measure of success to climb the smooth steel-coated concrete of the artificial bluff were not able to damage the wall effectively.

I’d been using a variety of different attacks, some of which I hadn’t touched since my supervillain days. Stripping molecular motion to freeze them, superheated plasma attacks, artificial lightning, even simply reaching into their chests at close range and stopping their beating heart’s motion seemed to be fairly effective, and keeping my cores spinning while I fought at a low level like this was surprisingly able to mostly keep up with my energy expenditures.

I was currently standing on two tiny pellets of kinetically neutral air about ten feet above the sea wall to keep clear of the rest of the defenders. Snapdolphins didn’t have a lot of… presence, which meant that whatever aura tended to keep me from doing whatever I wanted to with my abilities to their flesh had almost no effect as I simply removed the bonds holding their bodies together, one at a time, as Chinook’s powerful winds blew them off the wall so that I could disassemble them, explosively, without damaging the wall or its defenders.

I wasn’t flying. Man, I wish I could fly, but I guess to bystanders it certainly looked like I was hovering, even if I was just maneuvering by stepping from neutral pad to neutral pad and occasionally neutralizing spots temporarily to maintain my balance on the air while I fought.

The Flare, to my right, was somewhat effective, but they tended to specialize in abilities that looked amazing on broadcasts, like light illusions, duplication, and big, flashy effects. The supervillains to my right were much more effective. Still, I was reasonably certain that the drones that were hovering around and catching footage of the wall fight were focusing on The Flare’s flashy performance. While I wasn’t certain, I suspected that Crystal was fighting either in the nude or wearing an utterly transparent costume, showing off the newest Flare member’s crystalline, translucent physique to good effect.

Sex sells, as does exciting action, flashy effects, and heroic poses. The Flare’s leader, Magnum, heroically posed in a shower of blood as he ripped a snapdolphin in half with his bare hands and then held the halves up like a pair of prize marlins in a fishing tournament.

Of course, while I was destroying snapdolphins quickly, one at a time, the real heroes were the guys who were taking them out with area-of-effect attacks. Far to my right, Lord Necron was melting wave after wave, dozens of snapdolphins at a time having their flesh stripped from their bones by his death clouds at the base of the wall, but watching monsters getting their flesh dissolved was not good press, it was sort of disgusting which was why the cameras were focusing on hot girls shooting lasers.

To be fair, despite his intimidating name and powerset as well as a costume that strongly resembled a skull-headed villain from a popular eighties cartoon, Timothy Maclesh, Lord Necron, was a surprisingly affable guy. He was one of those alphas who simply didn’t have the right look for being a good guy, so when he wasn’t working with the monster hunters he occasionally had well-paid grudge matches with up-and-coming celebrity heroes.

The fact that his glowing purple clouds could selectively dissolve hero costumes and disrupt energy-based powers made him a very popular part-time villain. I’d had a few drinks with him to talk about being a favored male supervillain and honestly, I thought he was one of the good ones. He was also married to two wonderful baselines and had a total of six kids he was putting through college, and unlike a lot of alphas, he didn’t have any age-retardant factors and could look forward to growing old with his wives. Even at nearly fifty, though, with his skin-tight gray contraweave and skull-shaped helmet, he was powerfully built and still attracted a lot of attention.

He’d also had a long career with the monster hunters, which made him an exception, even if one of his legs had been replaced by a chrome semi-bionic prosthetic. He mentioned he would be retiring soon, and I figured, if I could, when he decided to take the big step I might try to give him a new-old leg as a retirement present. That and try to ensure that he wouldn’t be widowed for a long time if I could. He was on my list.

I was capable of doing small AOE effects and sent a bolt of carefully-controlled lightning along the base of the wall. Unfortunately, it was a pretty energy-intense effect, and with the way it jumped from snapdolphin to snapdolphin it tended to stun large groups rather than killing them quickly, but adding a large amount of kinetic energy to a rock at the base of the wall that shattered into a massive shotgun blast of tiny pellets that shredded through the beasts at mach five, while not as effective as Lord Necron’s clouds, still had a decent kill ratio.

“Blueprint, this is Princess Pixel.”

“Yes, I read you, what’s up?”

“Hey, the seismic and sonobouys are acting up. It doesn’t look like there’s any ground penetration, but whatever’s herding the snapdolphins is big, I’d put it at at least a class six, maybe even a class seven. If you can, let Breakwater know that there’s a big one incoming, and if it has enough mass, try to keep it from getting more than a half mile past the wall… it might not be subterranean, but the sheer mass could threaten the arcology if it gets too deep.”

I hopped back onto the wall and walked towards where Breakwater was coordinating with the flare. “Ma’am!” I said, allowing my suit speakers to enhance my voice enough to override the loud sounds of battle.

Three of the Flare, including Magnum and Crystal, looked up at me startled while Breakwater turned away from where she was using tidal rings to smash snapdolphins against the sea wall. “Yes, Blueprint?”

“The wave is subsiding, but the sonobuoys and seismic are reporting something BIG coming, probably a class six or maybe a seven. We need to focus on keeping it contained close to the sea wall, or it might cause some civilian casualties in the northern arcology.”

“Jacob?” I heard Christine’s voice say. Breakwater turned to her instantly. “Shut the fuck up now, Crystal Castle, or I will happily provide evidence that you are violating the doxxing act. This is neither the time nor the place.” she looked back at me. “How do you know this?”

I smiled a little, pleased that Breakwater had shut Christine up. “Cyberkinetic ally connection to the early warning network, Ma’am. We need to finish clearing up the trash as quickly as possible so we can focus.” I glanced at the members of The Flare. “That includes the lightweights. I will set up a series of kinetic bumpers to try and slow it down before it hits the walls, but I don’t know your forces. I am going to ask Chinook to try and play airwall in case it has any ranged or area attacks, and I know Necron can help dissolve it if I keep him covered, but I don’t know the rest of the forces… light attacks and light melee will probably just be casualties waiting to happen.”

She nodded and started barking orders. “Flare! Get off the wall, back up five hundred meters, and get ready to play second line.” she started running down the wall, yelling and separating the lights and armored humans and getting them off the wall down to where the National Guard, with their armored vehicles and heavy anti-armor artillery, had created a second line.

“Chinook, Please don’t get too excited when you see it. We think this thing might be a class seven. If it shoots anything, try to airwall it if it’s projectiles, but otherwise, stay clear. I know you are strong, but this thing has several thousand tons on you, if not more.”

She laughed into her speaker, “Oh, sweety, as cute as it is, you don’t need to protect my ego. I will be staying as far the fuck from a greater Kaiju as I can get. From what I can see, it looks like Titania is on her way over here, and while she may only be a class five, she’s more likely to be in its weight category.”

I jogged over to Lord Necron. “Hey, Tim. I am gonna try to hold the damned thing at bay. Do you have the energy left to build a really big cloud?”

He double-taked at me for a moment, “Wait, Jake? Damn, I like the new armor, man. It really brings out the color of your… lightning bolts. How big are we talking about?”

“Hold on a sec. Pixie, how big a mega are we talking about?”

“At least seventy meters. Some kind of modified whale, I think, but based on the tremors, bipedal with increased density, which means a serious risk of damaging the arcology if it gets too close.”

Kali had been… odd. She was a definite melee and fought with large curved swords, but when I took a few moments to watch her dive down onto the rocky shore and chop her way through a dozen snapdolphins, she momentarily seemed to just have WAY too many arms, or swords… she was just a buzz saw that hit the shore and sometimes jumped on top of a snapdolphin that climbed to high and drove it back into the rocky ground at the base of the wall before ripping her way back up to the wall.

A great form started cresting the waves, and the wall itself started to rattle as lightweights jumped off the side or climbed down the ladders seventy feet to the pavement. After a few minutes, the only people left on the wall were Kali, me, Lord Necron, and Breakwater who seemed to be struggling to do something with her powers. After a moment, Breakwater sighed and mopped at her brow with one arm. “I think I am tapped. I hate doing it, but I think we are going to have to do a strategic retreat to the second line.”

Kali shook her head, “It’s fine. I can help hold the wall, while Blueprint backs me up.”

“Huh?” I asked.

“Have Lord Necron hold off on the gas attack. Blueprint, you have my blueprint, right? That’s why I let you apport me.”

I nodded slowly, she was going to hold it? I mean, sure kinetic stability patches were powerful, but I doubted that they would have much effect on something the size of a skyscraper. Too much mass, not to mention that the great black and white form rising from the waves probably had a heart the size of a semi, no chance of simply stopping it, even if it only had a single one and I could get through its aura, which was MUCH stronger than the snapdolphins.

Breakwater nodded and smiled slightly, “Please try not to die. When it hits the wall, we are going to have APFSDSDU artillery unload on it.” She hopped off the wall, doing a 3-point landing at the bottom and darting towards the military line.

“What’s APDFSDSDSU?”

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“APFSDSDU. Armor-piercing, fin-stabilized, discarding sabot-depleted uranium rounds. Very stable, hit hard, and then twist and spin their way through a target. We don’t want to be on the wall when they fire, or the shockwave alone might be enough to hurt us badly. They are old tech, but upgrading something like that is almost pointless until you can start getting into railguns, which they also have. If we hear a boom, it’s best to just figure out where a good place is to uhh… re-materialize or rebuild from a blueprint, because you are probably already going to be going into shock if not dead.”

“Right, got it.” I glanced at Kali, “Seriously? You can hold it?”

She nodded slowly, “Yes, but it’s either peak tier six or low tier seven. I am solid tier seven, but you are tier eight even if you don’t believe it. I am definitely going to need your help. Hell, If Graviton were here, he could probably squash it like a grape, but if we are getting hit this hard here, the Kellar Academy probably has its own problems. That monster looks like it’s based on a killer whale, and killer whales travel in packs.”

She was right. It looked a lot like a killer whale, if a killer whale was almost a hundred feet tall, stood up on a serpentine tail, and had rolling gym beast muscular claw-tipped arms. “I sort of want to call it Orcahulk.”

Kali grinned, showing larger sharp canines than I expected, and said, “Go for it.” She was built like a goddess of war. Tall, ripped, and with a slightly blue skin tone and brilliant red hair down to her waist. Not exactly my cup of tea, but I knew a few guys who liked ‘take charge’ women that would have put her at the top of their spank bank.

“So how are we planning on doing this?”

She shrugged, “I wrassle with it while you kill it?”

I shook my head, “I think you might be a little overconfident.”

She laughed, “No, I am confident. You are tier eight. This thing should be a walk in the park, it’s only meat.”

I looked at the thing as it stalked closer to the wall. It was unbelievably fast, but with its size, it almost looked like it was plodding. “You and I apparently have very different concepts of what tier means. I am only level six, at best.”

“She is correct. Level and tier are not the same thing. One is a convenient term that idiots use to describe what they think is a person’s destructive potential, the other one is a very objective term referring to a person’s current stage of development. Your current stage is mortal tier eight, which means your ki condensation level is right on the cusp of becoming solidified. After you hit stage 9, you can form a foundation and start handling higher-stage materials.”

“Like she said, that beast is only meat. It doesn’t condense ki, it just contains it. A hell of a lot of it, which it needs to support it’s mass. It is big, but if you were the same size, you’d be a lot more powerful than it is.”

“Sure, but I am NOT the same size.”

“That’s just meaningless trivia. You know what they say, size doesn’t matter.”

I was not going to argue with the AI spiritual specter or whatever it was that Quiet Code was. Size very much mattered. Maybe it didn’t matter much if you were a highly trained martial arts master and your opponent was a four-hundred-pound meatball that never attacked anything but a bag of chips in the real world. It mattered a lot, especially since I was going to have to get very, very close for my active effects to have any impact whatsoever.

Kali stepped over the side of the sea wall, landing ankle-deep in the water.

Yeah, see, she stepped. And landed in the water, which was now only ankle-deep. To all of the rest of us it would have been damned near twenty feet deep, but she was now almost eighty feet tall, she had grown and expanded while she was stepping. Her swords had grown with her, as had the number of arms she had swords in, meaning she now had six. Right, morphing… and as a class six, she would be capable of taking out a city. I guess to be that seriously dangerous to architecture as a class six melee, you had to be capable of either incredible movement or you are VERY big, which she now was.

She wasn’t as big as Orcahulk, it towered over her, but she had sure narrowed the margin, and where the Orcahulk was fast but appeared slow due to its incredible size, she was just as fast as she had been at a more normal height. She started using her blades, and the sheer speed of the tips whipping about was causing roars as they broke, and maybe doubled, the speed of sound.

It was worse than a chop-socky movie because at least hidden masters weren’t impacting armored scales with enough force to cause the entire steel-coated sea wall to shudder. She was able to dodge the giant clawed hands that were almost as big as her torso, but the hits from her swords were barely scoring it each time she whipped one of the six blades around past its defenses and hit its thick hide.

I guess it was time to get involved.

***

“Keep a running energy total!” I yelled into my helmet, and my HUD obligingly showed ‘6112’ at the top of my view as I reformed right over the thing's left shoulder. I was balanced on a pocket of kinetically stabilized air, but I still had to get closer, so I launched myself at the gigantic shoulder as it swung its giant right arm around to try and claw Kali again.

Yeah, I misjudged it pretty harshly. Between its own turning speed and my jump, I was pretty sure I flattened myself against the wall of flesh at damned near forty miles an hour. Fortunately, it only staggered me between my own improved durability from whatever cycling had done to improve my body and the paranoid lengths I had gone to to make my armor as protective as possible.

My senses could only penetrate about twelve feet into the wall of blubber and reinforced hide, but as I started sliding down the thing’s broad back I went ahead and started separating the walls of flesh from each other to a maximum radius of twelve feet.

It probably didn’t help much that I was accelerating the particles as quickly as I could as they shot out of the rapidly forming trench I was sliding down, which I was doing on a molecular level rather than an atomic level. Molecules rapidly accelerated simply boil at something like the heat of a molten furnace, while atoms accelerated the same way tend to do things like collide and cause spontaneous fission, which tended to lead to a remarkably short lifespan.

This meant since I was getting bombarded by blood spurts that had enough pressure to rupture a two-inch hose, I had a choice… either get blown clear of the creature’s body or tunnel straight down and hope I wouldn’t reach the bottom of the hole I was making before I could find a way to splash into the ocean. Even with vacuuming up as much kinetic energy as I could, it was starting to get tight as I found myself surrounded by walls of flesh and oceans of gore.

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I had a moment of light as I fell out of the bottom portion of his chest, and yes, I suddenly realized on glancing down that it was definitely a he and started tunneling again as I hit his thigh. Unfortunately, I couldn’t hear much as my auto-dampeners had cut in to protect my ears from a screech that could probably have shattered walls, but I quickly cut another twelve-foot wide trench through the monster’s giant coils as I fell, leaving a smoking giant hole behind.

Quiet Code, of course, was polite enough to interpret.

“Kali says good hit. A few more of those and we will be good to go, but she asks that you hurry because he’s already gotten a hit on her.”

Of course, I was momentarily distracted, because a giant claw slammed on me the moment I appeared under the creature’s dropping tail.

Squish.

I reappeared on his OTHER shoulder, blueprinted back into being as something other than a human-shaped stain. No, I wasn’t immortal, I was pretty sure I could die, especially if I ran out of energy when I got hit, but as long as I could use my psyche to travel and blueprint my body and armor back into existence, I was pretty hard to kill.

Yes, it was a religious experience. What else could you call my psyche, which persisted even when my body was dissolved into trillions of tiny particles, and yet I could somehow still think and respond well enough to react despite the lack of a physically intact brain?

Call it my spirit, call it my soul, call it my residual consciousness, but I had no idea how it truly worked… all I knew was that when I apported I was still conscious the whole time, but other people that traveled with me had no memory of what happened. They were here, then they were there, without any conscious interruption of the time spent traveling whatsoever.

Whatever it was, though, I could still use it when my body was temporarily destroyed, but I was pretty sure that when I was in a ‘zombie state’ from energy debt, if my body stopped functioning, well, that would be it, permanently.

5420

The numbers suddenly reappeared as I started digging a new trench down the middle of the orcahulk’s torso. All I knew was, that I was REALLY glad that the trench walls were burning and the blood that was plastering my armor made it impossible to SEE any of what I was passing through as I fell, especially since I passed straight down and probably wound up vaporizing a chunk of the thing's boy bits as I went through

“Sorry, I suddenly lost connection and had to do a soft reboot. Apporting is one thing I was prepared for, I could tag along with your consciousness as you traveled, but that reset thing you did? I think you might have been dead for a moment.”

“I wasn’t dead. I mean, I didn’t lose consciousness so I am pretty sure I wasn’t actually dead. Sorry if I surprised you, but I am glad you are back.”

I suddenly realized, after I fell out of the bottom of Orcahulk’s torso in a place I was very glad I hadn’t seen close-up, that I had been followed… by a gigantic blade, where Kali had taken advantage of the vulnerability my trench had created to follow it with one of her swords. With a tremendous ripping noise that was so loud that even with my hearing protection I could feel it vibrating through my armor, the blade ripped half of the thing’s torso apart.

I quickly apported again, this time getting a good distance, and reappeared back on the sea wall, only to watch Kali, from a distance this time, chop the giant thing into several large pieces that flew away from her swords. She stood there, again like a goddess, and I realized that from this angle I got a great shot of underboob from the torn top she was wearing. I guess, if you were into seventy-foot-tall women, the underboob was probably the best part, but it didn’t exactly do much for me, especially when I realized she had a gigantic bleeding gash on her left leg and one of her six arms appeared to have been ripped entirely off.

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with a few steps, she hopped over and sat on the sea wall, shrinking back to her normally-impressive seven feet of height, and then said, crying, ‘Ow.’

“Hold still,” I said, quickly putting my hands on her shoulders and pulsing her blueprint for a moment. She was… deeply injured, and I lost another hundred energy repairing her, but she sighed in relief. Apparently, even though she could grow her arms, and at this size, it only looked like she had two, her blueprint had the potential for all six, and replacing one of them, even if it couldn’t be seen, used as much energy as replacing an entire arm.

“That was amazing.” we both said in unison and then she snickered, “Me first.”

I nodded, glad I could hear again, “Go for it.”

“That was amazing. You ripped right through that thing. I couldn’t even penetrate through that hide until you made big enough wounds that I could get through. I thought you were dead when it slapped at you like a mosquito. Then you flame-castrated it right after it fired off its spines. I thought it was going to cry.”

I shrugged, “I sort of was, but also I wasn’t… what you did was even more amazing. I mean, once you could get a good hit in, you tore that thing apart like a butcher through a side of beef. Why haven’t I heard of you before?”

She shrugged, “I don’t use that form. This is the first time I’ve fought a greater kaiju, and against normal-sized opponents, that size is almost useless. Sometimes I help the monster hunters, but I had to transfer here after an… incident, in Colorado. Comm lines get broken pretty frequently, so there isn’t a lot of pop culture transfer between the cities.

I sighed and asked a question that had been bugging me since I noticed her skin color and multiple arms. “Are you human?”

She smiled slightly, “As human as you are.”

“Oh great.”